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THE EVERLASraG GOSPEL, 



"0 God, Holy Ghost, . . . enlighten our minds more 
and more with the ligkt of the Eyeelasting Gospel." — 
(*'Book of Common Prayer," Office of Institution.) 






THE 



ENDLESS FUTURE 



OF THE 



HUMAN RACE. 



A LETTER TO A FBIEND. 



a SrHENRY, D.D. 



\\ 






■■ .-'^V JB79. _^ 
NEW YORK: ' ' ' " ' 



D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 

549 AND 551 BROADWAY. 
1879. 



r 



r-,^^. 



^< 



COPYEIGHT BY 

D. APPLETON & COMPANY, 
18T9. 




r 



PEEFAOE. 



The following letter to a friend was written 
several months before Canon Farrar's " Sermons on 
Eternal Hope " were preached, and before the arti- 
cle in the "North American Eeview" on "The 
Doctrine of Eternal Punishment " was published. 
It was specially intended, not for scholars or theo- 
logical doctors, but for a large and increasing 
class of readers " of average thoughtfulness and 
intelligence" who were brought up in the tradi- 
tional orthodox doctrine, but now find themselves 
troubled and distressed in the attempt to hold it. 

In what I have said with respect to the exe- 
getical question, " What does the New Testament 
teach concerning the duration of future punish- 
ment ? " I have quoted a good many passages from 
a little book entitled "Is Eternal Punishment 
endless ? " which I referred to as put out anony- 
mously, but which since then has come to a second 
edition, and is understood to have been written 



4 PREFACE. 

by Dr. Whiton. I have not seen tliis second 
edition. On the exegetical question I entirely 
agree with the ^dews Dr. Whiton presents. On 
this question I have for twenty years held the 
same view with him ; and in my letter I have 
gladly availed myself of the opportunity of quot- 
ing many of his expressions so forcibly pnt and so 
admirable for their spirit. 

I suppose my little tract contains a good many 
things from which a great many persons may dis- 
sent. I am sensible that I have not proposed nor 
attempted to dispose of all the difficulties of the 
subject. It was not within the scope of my pur- 
pose to do so. I hope, however, that what I have 
said will be clearly intelligible to all my readers, 
and that my treatment of the subject will not be 
objected to as wanting in fairness, modesty, and 
reverence. I wish my tract may be regarded not 
as a polemic discussion so much as a brief sug- 
gestive expression of the reasons one may find 
for reverently entertaining a humble hope and 
trust in the final triumph of Infinite Divine Love 
over all sin and sufiering in the universe. 

Stamford, Connecticut, November, 1878. 



CONTENTS. 



1. Introductory 

2. *' Future Punishment" 

3. The Duration of Future Punishment 

4. The Exegetical Inquiry 

5. An Open Question 

6. The Reasons for my Hope . 

7. Probation in the World to come 

8. Probationary Discipline 

9. Purgatory, but not the Romish one 

10. Praying for the Dead 

11. Hell— Hades— Gehenna . 

12. Through Pain to Penitence 

13. The Worm and the Fire 

14. Finale .... 



PAGE 

7 
8 
9 
12 
22 
24 
30 
32 
34 
36 
38 
41 
41 
44 



APPENDICES. 

I. Modern Orthodox Representations of Future Pun- 

47 

ishment . . • • • . •*< 

II. Medi^.val Opinion . . . • • ^^ 

III. Recent Roman Catholic Representations . . 64 

lY. Alexander Ewing, Bishop of Argyll and the Isles 73 



THE 



ENDLESS FUTURE OF THE HUMAN RACE. 



1. Introductonj, 

My dear FriejS^d : You tell me you believe — 
as you know I do — in the being of God as the 
eternal author, upholder, and ruler of the uni- 
verse, infinite in power, wisdom, and goodness. 
You tell me also you agree with me in believing 
that God has destined all his spiritual creatures 
to an endless duration of existence ; and you ask 
me whether I believe the common " orthodox " 
doctrine, that the fate of myriads of the human 
race — the great bulk, indeed, of mankind — will be 
one of never-ending sin and suffering in the world 
beyond the grave. To this question I frankly 
answer, No ; on the contrary, I say without hesi- 
tation that I humbly hope and trust that the 
endless existence of every human being will, in 
point of actual fact, become ultimately one of 
endless goodness and blessedness. 

That the orthodox doctrine should have gained 



8 ENDLESS FUTURE OF THE HUMAN RACE. 

and maintained for ages sucli a hold as it has had 
on the faith of the Christian world must be 
mainly attributed to the fact that it has leen le- 
lieved to he a divinely revealed doctrine taught hy 
Christ and his ajpostles ; for nothing short of this 
can suflSciently account for the acceptance of a 
doctrine so awful in it self , so overwhelming to 
the imagination, so frightfully repugnant to every 
one's instinctive desire of happiness for himself, 
and so shocking to the sensibilities of every one 
who loves his fellow creatures. Whether Christ 
and his apostles have really taught this doctrine 
is a point I propose to consider. But first I have 
something to say with respect to the sufferings 
ordained for sinful men in the world beyond the 
grave, considered apart from the question of their 
duration. 

^. " Future PunishnientP 

These words, in a just construction of their 
meaning, express a doctrine of natural religion 
which is proclaimed in the spiritual constitution 
of the human soul : in the absolute ideas of right 
and wrong ; of obligation and responsibility, merit 
and demerit, guilt and ill desert ; and in that ex- 
perience of remorse which (often so terribly) ac- 
companies the consciousness of ill desert — ^in these 
we recognize the voice of God speaking in the 
universal mind and heart of mankind. It is no- 
thing strange, therefore, that the belief in a state 



THE DURATION OF FUTURE PUNISHMENT. 9 

of future retribution has prevailed in every age of 
the world and in all nations, the rude and barbar- 
ous as well as the civilized and cultivated ; and in 
proportion as the higher degrees of culture have 
been reached, heathen philosophers have framed 
rational demonstrations, lieathen moralists have 
uttered solemn admonitions, and heathen poets 
have sung in fearful strains of the destination of 
men to a judgment beyond the grave. 

And what natural religion teaches Christianity 
unquestionably proclaims. Jesus Christ himself 
has so far drawn aside the veil that hangs between 
the present and the future as to disclose to us 
some glimpses of a place or state of suffering in 
the world beyond the grave. The images he em- 
ploys are quite fearful. But it avails nothing to 
say they are only images, mere metaphorical ex- 
pressions. What as matter of fact they mean to 
declare, is the question. About this there can be 
no doubt. They declare a reality and severity of 
suffering appointed for sinful men proportioned to 
every one's character, deserts, and needs. 

3, The Duration of Future Punishment. 

As to the duration of future punishment I do 
not think natural religion speaks decisively. It 
appears to me there is nothing in the necessary 
dictates of reason — nothing in the idea of God and 
a moral government, nothing in the sacred princi- 
ples of eternal justice, nothing in the nature of sin 



10 ENDLESS FUTURE OF THE HUMAN RACE. 

or in the degree of any sinner's guilt — which goes 
to demand or to justify an nnqualified assertion 
on the subject. So far as reason and reasonable 
considerations go, it seems to me that all that can 
be rightly said is that future punishment may pos- 
sibly be endless, and it may possibly not be so. 
These opposite possibilities both stand in the fact 
that, as in this life, so in the life to come, individ- 
ual character must determine individual destiny. 
The principles of a just divine administration de- 
mand that it shall go well with the righteous, but 
the wicked shall be in evil plight ; and by the con- 
stitution of the human soul sin and misery are in- 
separably wedded together : to be bad is in itself 
to be badly off. It is so in this life. It must 
needs be so in the life to come. Whoever passes 
from this world evil in character must, in the 
world beyond the grave, find himself in a condi- 
tion of corresponding ill-being or suffering which 
will last as long as he continues evil in character. 
This may possibly be forever. But on the other 
hand his character may become changed from 
wickedness to goodness, and thereby from wretch- 
edness to happiness. 

So much for what reason reasonably deter- 
mines. And as to Christianity, it is undeniable that 
it teaches, as I have said, a severe doctrine on the 
sufferings of the wicked in the world to come. 
But does it positively teach that there is to be no 
end to these sufferings ? Does it declare anything 



THE DURATION OF FUTURE PUNISHMENT. H 

more positive and absolute than what reason sug- 
gests and declares, namely, the hypothetical pos- 
sibility of an endless self-willed individual persis- 
tence in evil, and the consequent endless misery it 
must entail ? Or, in other words, does Christianity 
teach that in point of fact every human being who 
passes into the other world evil in character will 
continue forever evil and forever suffer the mis- 
eries of hell? 

This is a question purely of the interpretation 
of the meaning of the original language of the 
New Testament. Our English version expresses 
only the opinions of the translators as to the mean- 
ing of the original. They may be right or they 
may be wa-ong in their rendering — as all transla- 
tors are liable to be. It may indeed be admitted — 
and should be — that one may get from our English 
translation a sufficiently correct impression with 
respect to the fact and the severity of the suffer- 
ings ordained for sinful men in the world beyond 
the grave. But not so with respect to the dura- 
tion of those sufferings. This is a point not to be 
determined merely from the language of any trans- 
lation assumed to be a correct version of the ori- 
ginal language of the Xew Testament. For the 
previous question is precisely whether the version 
is correct. This is a question that can be deter- 
mined only by confronting the original language 
of the New Testament. It settles nothing to flash 
before men's eyes the words of our English trans- 



12 ENDLESS FUTURE OF THE HUMAN RACE. 

lation and exclaim, ''Everlasting is everlasting," 
'' Eternal is eternal." Nor is anything settled by 
a remarkable argument I have lately seen "^ which 
asserts that the New Testament teaches the end- 
lessness of future punishment because Christians 
have universally or nearly universally believed, 
and do believe, that it does so teach. For the 
principle on which the argument proceeds (even 
if the alleged universality of belief were a fact) 
would, by a parity of reasoning, go to prove that 
Copernicus and Galileo were heretics for asserting 
an astronomical theory contrary to the universal 
Christian belief of their day. The only way to 
settle the question (if it can be settled) is to as- 
certain simply as a matter of fact whether the ori- 
ginal words employed by Christ and his apostles 
do actually assert, either expressly or by direct 
implication, that the duration of the future suffer- 
ings of the wicked is to be strictly endless. It is 
a question of exegesis — of the correct interpreta- 
tion of the original words. This I feel bound to 
admit and maintain, and all the more so because 
it is not my purpose to go into an extended 
philological discussion. 

^. The Exegetical Inquiry, 

You say you are not a Greek scholar. I do 
not think it necessary you should be in order to a 
sufficient appreciation of what I have to say. I 

* " Sin and Penalty," by Hugh Miller Thompson, pp. 10-12. 



THE EXEGETICAL INQUIRY. I3 

take for granted tliat you do not wish to believe 
in the endless duration of future punishment. I 
take for granted that you and every right-hearted 
man would be glad to be able to believe the con- 
trary. And all I wish to show is that a just con- 
struction of the original language of the New 
Testament does not oUige you to believe that it 
positively teaches the absolute endlessness of the 
sufferings of sinners in the world to come. It is 
to this single point that I shall confine myself ; 
nor shall I go into an exhaustive discussion even 
of this point, but shall only present such a view of 
it as may suffice to establish what I have just 
said. 

I begin by considering the great text, Matt. 
XXV. 46. The determination of the meaning of 
that passage may be taken as determining the 
question as to all the teaching of the New Testa- 
ment on the duration of future punishment. 

Our English translators have rendered the pas- 
sage : " These shall go away into everlasting pun- 
ishment : but the righteous into life eternal." In 
doing so they have undoubtedly expressed their 
o]Dinion that our Lord intended to declare posi- 
tively the endless duration of future punishment. 
Taken in this sense, is their translation a correct 
one ? The answer turns on the meaning of a sin- 
gle word ; for, though our translators have used 
two words—" everlasting " in the first clause, and 
"eternal" in the second — yet in the original 



14 ENDLESS FUTUEE OF THE HUMAN KACE. 

there is but one and the same word. That word 
is alcopco<;y CBonian, Putting this word in both 
clauses, the passage would read : " These shall go 
away into ceonian punishment : but the righteous 
into ceonian life." What reason our translators 
had for using two different epithets to translate 
this one single word of the original is not per- 
fectly clear. But it is certain that if they had 
translated the word in both clauses by the epithet 
endless they would have expressed precisely what 
they took to be the meaning of the original — so 
far as respects duration. 

Does, then, the original word in this passage 
necessarily mean endless ? This raises the ques- 
tion whether, in the usage of the original writers 
of the New Testament, and of the Greek (Septua- 
gint) translation of the Old Testament, the adjec- 
tive CBonian is an unambiguous word, of invari- 
able signification, and when relating to duration 
always strictly and properly signifying a duration 
that is absolutely endless, l^ow, every scholar 
knows that such is not the fact. It is an ambigu- 
ous word of very variable signification. It is used 
in a great variety of meanings, both in the Greek 
(Septuagint) translation of the Old Testament and 
in the original Greek of the New Testament. 

I can not express the result to which I have 
been led, by a careful and, I think, unprejudiced 
examination of the original language of the New 
Testament, better than by citing the words of a 



THE EXEGETICAL INQUIRY. 15 

very seliolar-like and able little treatise entitled 
"Is Eternal Punishment endless?" — put out 
anonymously."^' The writer says that " the ad- 
jective monimi^ neither by itself nor by what it 
derives from its noun ceon^ gives any testimony 
to the endlessness of future punishment. Futu- 
rity being represented in the Noav Testament as 
a succession of eeons, ' seonian punishment ' — so 
far as the phrase itself can carry its own interpre- 
tation — is altogether of indefinite duration ; all 
that the definition ' seonian ' gives with any cer- 
tainty being this, that the punishment helongs to 
or occurs in the seen or the seons to come " (pp. 
16, 17). 

Among the great number of those whose opin- 
ions on this point may be thought to have a cer- 
tain force of authority, I will refer you only to 
two, than whom, on a question of sacred exege- 
sis, none can have greater weight. Dr. Pusey, as 
eminent for his Biblical learning as venerable for 
his character, says that the word ceonian can not 
rightly be translated as absolutely "everlasting." 
And the late Dr. Tayler Lew^s, equally eminent 
for " orthodoxy " and for scholarship, says : " Io- 
nian, from its adjective form, may perhaps mean 
an existence, a duration, measured by ceons or 
worlds, just as our present world or seon is mea- 
sured by years or centuries. But it would be more 
in accordance with the plainest etymological usage 

* Published by Lockwood, Brooks & Co , Boston, 18'76. 



16 ENDLESS FUTURE OF THE HUMAN RACE. 

to give it simply tlie sense of ceonicy denoting the 
world to come. ' These shall go away into the 
punishment [the restraint, imprisonment] of the 
world to come, and these into the life of the world 
to come.' This is all we can etymologically or 
exegetically make of the word in this passage " 
(Matt, xxv.)."^ In this connection Dr. Lewis ad- 
verts to the " aspect of finality " which is pre- 
sented to lis in the scene portrayed in that pas- 
sage. No doubt it has such an aspect. 'No doubt 
the same is true in many other passages. But 
this raises the question " whether this finality is 
relative or absolute. Does it cover merely an in- 
definite period, however protracted, or a duration 
that never comes to a period ? " f On this point 
(the question, namely, of absolute finality) there 
is something I may well refer those to who take 
the Mosaic account (Gen. ii. 11) for a literal his- 
tory. God is there represented as declaring, " In 
the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." 
Nothing can have more the " aspect of finality" 
than this. Yet, immediately after the disobe- 
dience of man, there was a new dispensation dis- 
closed — the seed of the woman bruising the ser- 
pent's head. Why, then, may there not be a 
future disclosure which shall show that the ceoiiian 
punishment of the wicked is not an absolute final- 
ity ? I trust there will be, though I do not take 

* Lewis, excursus in Lange's " Commentary," p. 48. 
t "Is Eternal Punishment endless? '* p. 35. 



THE EXEGETICAL INQUIRY. 17 

the Mosaic record to be literally historical. I have 
other reasons for my trust. 

Before concluding these remarks on Matt. 
xxY. 46, there is another point to be considered. 
It is alleged by some that this passage proves the 
endlessness of the ceonian punishment by the 
strongest implication, even though it be admitted 
that as a direct statement it is not decisive. The 
argument is, that whatever holds true of the dura- 
tion of ceonian " life " must hold true of the ceo- 
nian " pimishmentj^ for ^' both states," as Profes- 
sor Lewis says, " are precisely parallel, and we 
can not exegetically make any difference in the 
force and extent of the terms." .IS^ow this, I 
grant, would be decisive if " seonian life " denoted 
merely or primarily a certain length of life. But 
this is not the case. Perpetuity of duration is 
indeed involved, but in the primary sense of the 
words " seonian life" signifies a certain hind of 
life — a spiritual state, disposition, or character of 
the soul. It is so used in a great many passages : 
as in John v. 24, "He that heareth my word 
and believeth on him that sent me .... hath 
seonian life . ... is passed from death unto 
life " ; John iii. 36, " He that believeth on the 
Son hath seonian life " ; 1 John v. 11, 12, " This 
is the record that God hath given us seonian life, 
and this life is in his Son. He that hath the 
Son [the spirit of the Son] hath life ; and he that 
hath not the Son of God hath not life"; John 



18 EXDLESS FUTURE OF THE HUMAN RACE. 

xvii. 3, " This is the seonian life, that they may 
know thee the only God, and Jesus Christ whom 
thou hast sent." All these and such like passages 
denote primarily a spiritual state, a kind of life 
and not length of life. 

I come now to one consideration more which 
goes decisively to settle the question lefore us. 

It is a fact which I suppose no competent 
scholar will deny, that " the Greek, like the Eng- 
lish, has its appropriate words to express with pre- 
cision the idea of endlessness. When the endless- 
ness of future punishment was first declared to be 
an article of the orthodox faith (a. d. 544), the 
word ateleutetoSj endless, was employed for that 
purpose." ^ And I take it to be undeniable that it 
was as easy in the Greek language as it is in the 
English to find words to express decisively the 
idea of absolute endlessness. We are brought, 
therefore, to confront the great question, Why is 
it that in the original language of the New Testa- 
ment our Lord is represented as using the am- 
higuons^ indeterminate woo'd ceonian? This is a 
question that can not be evaded — it must be met 
face to face. And I am bold to say that it is 
utterly impossible to give any other reasonable 
answer to the question than this : that it was be- 
cause our Lord intended not to make a decisive 
declaration as to the duration of future punish- 

* " Is Eternal Punishment endless ? " p. 8. 



THE EXEGETICAL IXQUIRY. 19 

ment Whatever his reasons were for leaving the 
question undecided, it is certain that his words, 
" These shall go away into ceonian punishment," do 
not oblige me to helieve in the absolute endlessness 
of that punishment, any more than they authorize 
me to disbelieve in it. One thing, however, is 
certain, namely, that they give me a perfect right 
to deny that he has in this great passage decisive- 
ly TAUGHT the endless duration of future punish- 
ment, and leave me at liberty to entertain what- 
ever opinion on that point I find good ground in 
reason for adopting. So much with respect to the 
meaning of Matt. xxv. 46. 

There are other passages in the New Testament 
relating to future punishment in which the epithet 
ceonian is found. But " none of the words which 
we find coupled with the epithet — such as ' seonian 
jire^ (Matt, xviii. 8), or ' seonian damnation^ or 
' seonian judgment ' (Heb. vi. 2) — adds any further 
definiteness to the indefinite adjective." ^ 

But are there not other statements which ex- 
plicitly or by implication go decisively to deter- 
mine the question which our Lord, in Matt. xxv. 
46, left undetermined ? On this point the writer 
just referred to says : '^ As to explicit statements, 
there are some which our version makes quite as 
decisive as it takes the passage Matt. xxv. 46 to 
be ; but in the original they are equally indeter- 
minate. In Mark ix. 43, for instance, we read 

* " Is Eternal Punishment endless ? " p. 18. 



20 ENDLESS FUTURE OF TEE HUMAN RACE. 

of ' the fire that never shall be quenched.' The 
word ' never' is a contiibution of our translators 
to the original asbestos. This may be translated 
' nnquenched ' as correctly as ' unquenchable.' 
And even if we call it ' unquenchable/ this epi- 
thet is equally open to a limited interpretation. 
We often say that a conflagration ' raged with 
unquenchable fury,' meaning that it could not be 
quenched till its material was consumed. The 
epithet asbestos is applicable to a fire that lasts 
very long, or a fire that is for a time beyond all 
control, as fairly as to a fire that is literally end- 
less. How, then, do we know that the latter is the 
real meaning of our Lord's word ? . . . 

" A similar addition to the limited force of the 
original has been made by the translators in Mark 
iii. 29, ' hath never forgiveness,' etc. The origi- 
nal, in the most approved text, reads ' hath not 
forgiveness for the aeon, but is involved in an 
seonian sin.' The idea is stated more explicitly in 
the parallel text in Matt. xii. 32, where the ori- 
ginal, fairly rendered in our version, reads ' it 
shall not be forgiven him either in this seon or in 
the one to be.' It is remarkable that St. Augus- 
tine himself derived from this text the idea that 
in the coming seon some would obtain forgiveness 
who were unforgiven in the present. ... We 
have, however, observed that the Scriptures speak 
of futurity as running its course through ' seons 
of aeons.' What, then, of him who finds no for- 



THE EXEGETICAL INQUIRY. 21 

giveness ' in the seon that is to be ' after the 
present ? Are we to assume that he will never 
find it in any succeeding aeon ? ... So far from 
the absolute endlessness of future punishment 
being taught by these two texts, it is the very 
point which they abstain from pronouncing. 

" Perhaps no text has been more strained be- 
yond its legitimate import, for proof of the end- 
lessness of future punishment, than John iii. 36, 
' He that believeth not the Son shall not see life ; 
but the wrath of God abideth on him.' ' Shall 
not see life ' is assumed to mean ' shall never see 
life.' ' The wrath of God abideth on him ' is as- 
sumed to be the same as ^abideth evermore.^ 
The text is declared to teach the unbeliever's irre- 
coverable abandonment to the powers of punish- 
ment. . . . But compare 1 John iii. 14, ' He that 
loveth not his brother abideth in death.' How 
long ? So long as he ' loveth not his brother.' 
JSTo one presses the extreme inference that every 
unloving soul in this world abideth irrecoverably 
in death. What warrant have we for treating the 
other ' abideth ' any differently ? ... It is an 
abuse of the text to make it declare anything more 
than the truth that shines on the face of it, name- 
ly, that ' he who believeth not the Son shall not 
see life' while he remains in unbeliefs ^ but the 
wrath of God abideth on him ' so long as he con- 
tinues an unbeliever. Any other interpretation 
would condemn to final ruin every person in the 



22 EXDLESS FUTURE OF THE HUMAN RACE. 

world who is at present not a believer in Christ. 
And this is the sort of evidence on which many 
good people are content, through the force of un- 
reflecting habit, to rest the tremendous bm^den 
of the doctrine of an absolutely endless punish- 
ment. . . . 

'^ The result of our inquiry thus far is that the 
texts which in our English Bibles appear to teach 
in the plainest manner the endlessness of future 
punishment do not seem to teach it in an exact 
and unprejudiced interpretation of the original. 
The utmost that can be said is, that thev leave the 
duration of future punishment indefinite ; they 
abstain from saying that it is absolutely and liter- 
ally endless." ^ 

So much with respect to the exegetical question. 
As expressing my own opinion on this question, 
I have, as you may perceive, quoted very largely 
the language of the little treatise to which I have 
so often referred. 

5. An Oj)en Question. 

I take it to be undeniable that our Lord has 
left the question as to the endlessness of future 
punishment an open question. And such it was 
regarded in the Christian Chui;ch for five hundred 
years, during which period " it was not inconsis- 
tent with a reputation for orthodoxy to believe and 
teach that the ' seonian punishment ' would some 

* *' Is Eternal Punishment endless ? " pp. 19 et seq. 



AN OPEX QUESTION. 23 

time terminate. . . . The endlessness of that 
punishment was first authoritatively announced 
as an article of the orthodox creed in the sixth 
century at the iitetance of the Emperor Justinian 
1.5 an authority in theological matters of equal 
respectability with that of King Henry YIII." '^ 

The history of the Church of England gives 
us a significant fact on this subject. In the first 
draft of the Articles of Religion of that church 
there was one (the forty-second) which contained 
a decree affirming the endlessness of future pun- 
ishment. This article was in the subsequent re- 
vision stricken out. The significance of the 
omission is this : it was, as Mr. Maurice says^f a 
" careful, considerate omission, in a document for 
future times, of that which had been too hastily 
admitted. . . . The omission was made by per- 
sons who probably were strong in the belief that 
the punishment of wicked men is endless, but who 
did not dare to enforce that opinion upon others." 
The members of the English Church were thus 
left at liberty to hold whatever opinion on the 
subject they saw fit to entertain. From that day 
to this it has been, and is now, an open question 
in that church — as also in the Anglo-American 
daughter church. 

Supposing Mr. Maurice to be correct in what 
he says respecting the personal opinions of the 

* *'Is Eternal Punishment endless ?" p. 18. 

t See Maurice, *' Theological Essays," pp. 34'7-349. 



24 ENDLESS FUTURE OF THE HUMAN RACE. 

revisers who threw out the forty-second article, I 
have to remark that there is a sense in which I 
am of the same opinion with them — that is to 
say, I believe "the punishment «i©f wicked men" 
is endless in case the wickedness is endless; but 
that wicked men dying in their wickedness are 
divinely debarred from any chance of fnture re- 
pentance and restoration to goodness and blessed- 
ness (which is what these revisers " probably were 
strong in the belief of "), that is something I do 
not believe. On the contrary, as I have said at 
the outset, I have a humble hope and trnst that 
the endless existence of every hnman being will 
ultimately become one of endless goodness and 
blessedness. My reasons for this hope I now pro- 
ceed to give you, 

6. The Reasons for my Hojpe. 

My hope and trust in the final restoration of 
all men to goodness and blessedness are grounded 
in my conviction of the infinite goodness of God, 
and in the consideration of the immense resources 
of influence — compatible with the spiritual free- 
dom of his rational creatures — which his infinite 
power and wisdom enable him to employ for ac- 
complishing this end. 

The goodness of God can not otherwise be 
rightly conceived than as consisting in his infinite 
love and infinite righteousness, which are the es- 
sential elements of his eternal nature. God is 



THE REASONS FOR MY HOPE. 25 

love. Love is devotion. There is no selfisliness 
in pure and perfect love ; and God's love to man- 
kind is an infinite, unselfish devotion to their 
highest well-being. God is righteousness : he is 
incapable of doing anything wrong, anything con- 
trary to the principles of absolute and immutable 
justice — incapable, therefore, of wronging a single 
human being. We are the offspring of God ; we 
owe our existence to his fatherly love. When 
he brought us into being he formed us in his own 
spiritual image — making us like himself rational 
and free, and so capable of endless goodness and 
blessedness. The final cause, therefore, of our ex- 
istence — the supreme end fornvhich he created 
us — was that we might become forever good and 
forever blessed. It lies in the very necessity of 
his essential goodness that he should desire us 
to realize this supreme end of our being. It must 
needs be the dearest wish of his fatherly heart 
that every individual of the human race should in 
Ihe measure of his capacity become loving and 
righteous as he himself is, and so forever blessed 
with a spiritual blessedness like his own; and, 
moreover, that he must hold himself bound in 
righteousness — as well as be prompted by love — 
to do everything in his power to secure this end. 
He would not otherwise be a God of love and 
righteousness. This I am compelled to beheve 
by the necessity of the reason and conscience he 
has made me with. 



26 EXDLESS FUTURE OF THE HUMAN RACE. 

The thouglit tliat the fate of any of the chil- 
dren of the infinitely loving Father should, 
through their own self-willed and obstinate resis- 
tance to his holy and loving wish and will, be 
necessarily one of endless sinfulness and woe — 
the thought of this, regarded as a bare theoretical 
possibility, is enough to fill the mind and heart 
with unutterable awe and sadness. Yet that it 
may be so is what must be admitted as a theoreti- 
cal possibility ; for it is a necessary corollary from 
the idea of that freedom of the will without 
which there could be neither any proper responsi- 
bility nor any true goodness of character. 

But the thought that it will be actually so in 
any case through default of anything which God 
could do to prevent it, is monstrous; and still 
more monstrous is the thought that it will be so 
through any efficient purpose or agency on God's 
part to make it so. It is impossible to imagine 
anything more utterly abominable — ^more at vari- 
ance with the idea of a good God and more re- 
volting to every just human sentiment — than these 
monstrous notions. They make God the infinite 
evil one. No matter by what authority my ac- 
ceptance of them is claimed, I have not a mo- 
ment's hesitation in rejecting them It is enough 
for me that such notions contradict the eternal 
principles of absolute righteousness. 'No tradi- 
tion, no amount of historical evidence, no author- 
ity of any sort, can rightfully establish the divine 



THE REASONS FOR MY HOPE. 27 

origin of a religion wliicli propounds to our belief 
things so absolutely contradictory to reason and 
conscience. I would sooner be an atheist than 
accept them. Better a chance-medley universe 
than one controlled by a Supreme Being capable 
of creating millions of human creatures with a 
predetermination to condemn them to everlasting 
misery. 

I believe the love of the Infinite Father of spir- 
its embraces every individual of the human race. 
It is his being and nature to love them all with a 
love that is as holy as it is tender. Our sinfulness 
is revolting to him, but it does not destroy his 
love. He loves us in spite of it, and would fain 
draw us to repentance and to holiness. Sin-hating, 
but sinner-loving ! Such has ever been, is now, 
and must forever be, God's heart toward every in- 
dividual of our race. To his tender love for man- 
kind we owe the method of salvation disclosed in 
the gospel. The only salvation that could save a 
sin-disordered race must needs be a salvation from 
sin, from its inward, deadly power. Such a salva- 
tion God only could provide, and was behooved by 
his holiness and love to provide. He has done so. 
He sent his Son into the world to take our nature 
and in it to live, to suffer, and to die. Why this 
particular method of Divine intervention in our be- 
half was chosen I can not say, or rather I will not 
permit myself to speculate about it. N'or am I 
able to explain how it is that Christ's coming, liv- 



28 EXDLESS FUTURE OF TEE HUMAN RACE. 

ing, suffering, and dying effected the salvation of 
the human race. The quo modo of the efficacious 
connection between the coming of Christ and the 
potential restoration of the race I can not under- 
stand. I adopt the ^^ew of Bishop Butler and of 
Coleridge — that it is a transcendent fact. I can 
indeed imderstand what is clearly declared, name- 
ly, that the mission of Christ was the Infinite Fa- 
ther's method of love to man. This his Son, the 
Divine Missionary, came proclaiming: "God so 
loved the world that he sent his Son that the 
world might through him be saved." Here we 
have the great historic truth that God sent his 
Son. Here we have the loving motive and the 
inestimable benefits procured for man. But I 
find no explanation of the how. Many theories 
have been framed, diverse and conflicting, and 
some of them immoral and monstrous. I reject 
them all. I do not believe in any wrathful and 
avenging God "sheathing his flaming sword in 
his Son's vital blood" — according to the words 
of good Dr. "Watts's pious-impious hymn. I do 
not believe in any horrible forensic device for 
"satisfying Divine justice" by outraging the in- 
most principle of righteousness. 

God's love and Christ's love ! This is all the 
theory I find. A salvation provided as wide as 
the needs of mankind. What a monstrous doc- 
trine that is which says God sent his Son into 
the world that a part only of the world might 



THE REASONS FOR MY HOPE. 29 

througli him be saved, leaving the rest, in count- 
less millions, to a foreordained fate of helpless, 
hopeless, endless perdition ! What a doctrine 
which says that Christ laid down his life not for 
every man but only for a certain arbitrarily se- 
lected number, and that the Holy Ghost, the Sanc- 
tifier, is given only to those elected ones ! The 
God that I believe in and trust is one who declares 
himself " lovino^ unto everv man " — whose " ten- 
der mercies are over all his works." In the gos- 
pel, as I read it, I find disclosed a provision for 
the salvation of all men, even though the knowl- 
edge of the method of it be not now imparted to 
all. Everywhere over all the earth, from the day 
when the history of humanity began, God has 
been '^ in Christ reconciling the world unto him- 
self." Everywhere, in every age, the Spirit of 
God has wrought in every unresisting human soul 
to quicken " that faith which is the germ of all 
that is good in human character " — that implicit 
faith, that disposition, which may exist in the 
heart and will of men to whom the Saviour's name 
is yet unknown. And so it is said that " in every 
nation he that feareth God and worketh righteous- 
ness " — according to the light that is in him — is 
accepted of him. And whatever knowledge it is 
necessary for him to have in order to an exj)licit 
faith in Christ, shall some time — in God's good 
time — ^be given; and what is not given in this 



30 EXDLESS rUTUKE OF THE HUMAN RACE. 

world will, I can not doubt, be given in the world 
to come. 

The Infinite Father has not fully explained his 
reasons for leaving the light of the gospel to make 
its wav through the operation of historical causes, 
and with such slow progress and imperfect spread. 
But their wisdom and goodness we can not doubt. 
One thing we may take for certain : that human 
history has from its beginning been conducted 
under the superintendence of God's never-failing 
providence, and the dispensation of his gracious 
Spirit working in every human soul. 

Nor can we doubt that throughout the lifetime 
of humanity upon the earth the course of human 
history will go on upon the same principles as 
have presided over it from the beginning. 

And as to human history in the world beyond 
the grave, I can not doubt that the same principles 
will continue to prevail. I can not doubt that so 
long as evil shall exist the supreme pui-pose of 
God's government over the human race will be to 
overcome evil by good ; that so long as there shall 
be souls unsaved from sin, God must needs strive 
to save them by all the reclaiming powers of his 
providence and grace which his almighty good- 
ness enables him to employ. 

7. Probation in the World to come. 

The idea of a continued probation for the hu- 
man race in the world bevond the OTave underUes 



TROBATION IN THE WORLD TO COME. 31 

pretty nearly everything I have written. In what 
Christ and his apostles have said I find nothing 
w^hich obliges me to believe that the present life 
is the only period of probation allotted to man- 
kind ; and it seems to me there is nothing in the 
reason of the case that demands or justifies such a 
belief. On the contrary, every analogy of reason 
— everything in the character of God and in the 
principles and facts of the Divine administration 
— goes to justify the presumption of a future 
state of probation. AVhat reason — compatible with 
God's character as a being of infinite holiness and 
righteousness, love and mercy — can be imagined 
w^hy he should not carry the dispensation of the 
gospel into the future world ? Why should he 
not continue to do there what he is now doing 
here ? Think how he is dealing with us now, here 
in this life ! By his gracious Spirit working in 
every human soul, by the manifold methods of 
his ever-watchful and all-ordering providence, by 
the whole discipline of life, he is now always try- 
ing to reclaim us from sin to goodness and to him- 
self. Why, I say, should he not continue to deal 
with us in the world to come as he is dealing with us 
now ? Why should he stop trying to rescue sinful 
souls from the dominion and misery of sin merely 
because they have passed from this world into the 
world bej^ond ? ' Certainly the event which we call 
" death " can not be conceived as making any 
change in God's loving and merciful disposition 



32 ENDLESS FUTURE OF THE HUMAN RACE. 

toward them. ITor can that event be conceived as 
working any such change in their spiritual nature 
or in their character as to make them no longer 
proper subjects for his Divine mercy, or to put 
them beyond the reach of his reclaiming efforts. 

I can not, therefore, believe the common no- 
tion, that the fate of every individual of the hu- 
man race is unalterably determined for weal or 
for woe Iby each one's character at the moment of 
death. And I can not help entertaining the belief 
that human probation will be continued in the 
world beyond the grave. 

8. Probationary Discijoline. 

After what I have elsewhere said, I need not 
add anything here to show that I accept our Lord's 
declaration, that at the day of judgment he will 
sentence the wicked to "go away into seonian 
punishment " ; and that I also accept the represen- 
tations which he and his apostles have made of 
the severities of that punishment. But I do not 
find it divinely revealed that the sufferings which 
sinners will be made to endure will be wholly and 
exclusively of the nature of retribittive inflictions. 
If in any degree they shall be of that quality, every 
sinner will be dealt wdth according to his charac- 
ter and ill desert. No one will be made to suffer 
unjustly. No one will be punished beyond his 
desert. Every sufferer will see and feel that he 
deserves all he suffers. 



J^ 



PROBATIONARY DISCIPLINE. 33 

But the 2M^"(^^ount object of the punislinient I 
am fain to believe will be the reforination of the 
sinner. This we know is the great object of all the 
severe and painful discipline to which God often 
subjects his creatures here in this world — not " for 
his own pleasure but for our profit, that we may be 
partakers of his holiness " ; and this I persuade 
myself will be the great object of the chastise- 
ments of the world to come. I can not help hum- 
bly lifting up my heart to the Infinite Father to 
sanction my hope and trust in the beneficent pur- 
pose of these Divine inflictions. And my thoughts 
frame themselves on this wise : O all-holy and 
all-merciful God ! thou hast not formed any of 
thy spiritual creatures for endless sin and wretch- 
edness, but for goodness and blessedness. Thou 
hat est nothing that thou hast made, and dost for- 
give the sins of all those who are penitent. Thou 
desirest not the death of any sinner, but that he 
may turn to thee and live. This thou art per- 
petually declaring to us now — ever moving and 
drawing us by thy Holy Spirit working within us 
and by all the influences of thy good providence 
surrounding us here in this world. And why 
shouldst thou in the world to come abandon and 
cast off forever all thy creatures who may here in 
this world have withstood thy loving endeavors to 
turn them from sin % Shall not thy love follow 
them there ? Wilt thou, after the short probation 
of this little life is over, utterly take thy Spirit 



34: ENDLESS FUTURE OF THE HUMAN RACE. 

from them, and give them no further chance for 
repentance and amendment? That be far from 
thee, O Lord ! I can not — I can not think of thee 
as mexorably shutting thine ears to the cries for 
mercy thy sinful children may raise to thee. Thou 
mayst put them to sufferings in the world to 
come. This thy Son hath disclosed in fearful 
terms. But " God is love/' and " our God is a 
consuming fire." That fire, then, must needs be 
a fire of love, however sharp the pain of it may 
be — not a fire of hatred or of vengeance, but a 
purifying and refining fiame. 

9. P%iTgatory^ litt not the Romish one, 

I believe in a purgatory, but I reject the Rom- 
ish doctrine concerning it, because it excludes from 
the benefit of purgatorial discipline the souls of 
such as die in what it calls " mortal sin " — terming 
them ^^lost" souls, and consigning all such to end- 
less torments in the place or state which it desig- 
nates as hell ; and, on the other hand, admits into 
its purgatory only such as die in a state of grace, 
obnoxious only to a "temporal (temporary) pun- 
ishment," and whom it terms "pious souls." 

Contrary to all this, I hold that a purgatorial 
discipline is appointed for all souls who need it^ 
and in proportion to the degree and quality of 
their need. The best of those who are not holy 
enough to go immediately from death to the bles- 
sedness of heaven will not be exempted from any 



PURGATORY, BUT NOT THE ROMISH ONE. 35 

needful severity of God's loving and merciful dis- 
cipline, and the worst and wickedest of them will 
not be excluded from its benefits. All will be em- 
braced within the scope of its beneficent Divine in- 
tention. So I humbly presume to hope and trust. 
Again, the doctrine of the Eomish Church 
goes upon the principle that after sinners have, 
through repentance and faith, been freed from 
the guilt and endless punishment incurred by sin, 
there yet remains a " temporal punishment " due 
to Divine justice^ which must be endured either 
in this world or in purgatory — unless it be remit- 
ted, as in whole or in part it may be, on certain 
conditions imposed by the Church. In accordance 
with this dogma the Komish Church represents 
the suff'erings appointed for souls in purgatory to 
be wholly of the nature of penalties inflicted for 
the satisfaction of a debt due to Divine justice. 
I reject this representation, and I reject the dogma 
it goes upon, as false and unrighteous in principle 
and mischievous in its practical consequences — ^ly- 
ing as it does at the basis of the whole scheme of 
corrupt teaching and practice of the Eomish Church 
in the matter of indulgences, penances, satisfac- 
tions, and all special conditions on which purga- 
torial pains and penalties may be mitigated, or 
shortened, or altogether averted and evaded, in 
virtue of an authority to that effect vested in the 
priesthood of the Church — a most dangerous and 
corrupting power, as the whole history of the Eom- 



36 ENDLESS rUTURE OF THE HUMAX EACE. 

ish Clmrcli testifies. I reject this whole scheme. 
I hold that the sufferings appointed to be endured 
in the worid beyond the grave are not of the na- 
ture of judicial penalties for the satisfaction of Di- 
vine justice, but are inflicted by God's fatherly 
mercy as a reforming and pmifying discipline. 

10. Praying for the Dead, 

I believe, moreover, that we may and should 
pray for those who have passed away from this 
life. To do so seems to me the spontaneous im- 
pulse of eveiy kind and loving heart — an impulse 
which will naturally prompt us first and most 
strongly to intercede for those we have most ten- 
derly loved and who have loved us here in this 
life — to pray for such by name ; an impulse that 
will also prompt us to pray with like particularity 
for those who have done us any wrong or had any 
ill will toward us ; and, finally, an impulse that 
will prompt us to pray for the souls of all our 
fellow creatures in the world beyond the grave. 
I know that God knows what every one of them 
has need of, and what methods of reforming: disci- 
pline are suited precisely to each one's case. And 
I think we may fervently implore his mercy upon 
them in the humble, trustful hope that he will so 
deal with them all as to purge them from sin and 
establish them in that "holiness without which no 
man shall see the Lord." Jesus has said, "If I be 
lifted up upon the cross I will draw all men unto 



PRAYING FOR THE DEAD. 37 

me." And Holy Writ has declared that he shall 
see the travail of his soul and be satisfied. Can 
he ever be satisfied so long as there are souls for 
whom he died unreclaimed and unrestored ? And 
can the love of the Infinite Father ever be satis- 
fied so long as sin and the woe of it exist anywhere 
in his universe ? Can he ever cease to work for 
its extinction ? 

If it be said that this goes to suggest and justi- 
fy the idea of the final restoration to goodness and 
blessedness of not only all human spirits, but of 
all sttperhuman fallen and sinful spirits too, I can 
only say : Well, what then? Is not such a con- 
summation one which every good and benevo- 
lent heart must be glad to believe in, if he may ? 

The "fallen angels," as they are called, are 
said in Scripture to be reserved in darkness and 
chains unto a day of judgment yet to come. 
But after that day how may it fare with them ? 
They are, equally with human beings, the off- 
spring of the love of the Almighty Father of all 
spirits, and higher, as is supposed, in original 
rank and endowments than we of the human race 
are. What if there be a dispensation of Divine 
mercy, hereafter to be disclosed, which shall in- 
clude them all ? Would not such a dispensation 
be in harmony with all that we know of the char- 
acter and disposition of God ? Can we, indeed, 
help thinking that God's love must needs prompt 
him to provide such a dispensation ? At any 



38 ENDLESS FUTURE OF THE HUMAN RACE. 

rate, I am sure of this mucli, that if any of God's 
sinful children, anywhere throughout the uni- 
verse, shall be finally lost, it will not be for lack 
of anything he can do to reclaim them to good- 
ness and to himself ; and I can not but hope and 
trust that he will employ the resources of his in- 
finite powder and wisdom so as in the end to bring 
them all into a holy and blessed union with him- 
self. But to return from this digression and go 
on a little with the consideration of the sufferings 
which may be ordained for sinful human beings 
in the world beyond the grave. 

11, Hell — Hades — Gehenna. 

Hell — whether as the Hades or the Gehenna 
of which our Lord has given us glimpses — I take 
to be in its paramount intention a grand reforma- 
tory institution with a discipline beneficently de- 
signed to lead men through pain to penitence. 
In what way it can and may work this end under 
God's presiding providence and through the gra- 
cious infiuences of his good Spirit, he understands 
better than I can, and I am persuaded that he 
will order the discipline, in its quality and degree 
and circumstances, according to the character and 
peculiar needs of every soul that passes from this 
life into the life beyond the grave. JSTo doubt 
there are many gradations of evil character in 
hell, just as there are many gradations of holy 
character in heaven. The poor rich man in the 



HELL— HADES— GEHENNA. 39 

parable was far from being wliolly evil in charac- 
ter. With what eager unselfishness he begged 
that his five brethren might be warned of the con- 
sequences of living wholly luxurious, self-indul- 
gent lives, so as not to come into the sad state of 
suffering he had sunk to ! I am thankful for this 
trait which our Lord has introduced into the won- 
derful word picture he has painted. 

There are many mansions in heaven, we are 
told, and I doubt not there are also many man- 
sions in hell. Every dweller there will be put 
into the one he ought to be put into — the one 
that is best fitted for him ; and will have to un- 
dergo there the sort and degree of purifying dis- 
cipline which is necessary, fit, and most for his 
good — whether it be in the way of the natural 
consequences of sin (as we use the terms), or of 
specially appointed superaddition ; whether it be 
from internal or external cause, or both. About 
all this it is idle to speculate. God, the sin-hating 
but sinner-loving God, will order all that. 

But there is another point about which some- 
thing may be said, namely, why it is that to us 
now living here in this world, under the dispensa- 
tion of the gospel, our Lord has made such a dis- 
closure of the sufferings to be endured by sinful 
men in the world to come. These representa- 
tions are addressed not directly to our reason and 
conscience, but to our sensibilities ; to the natural 



40 EXDLESS FUTURE OF THE HUMAX RACE. 

dread witli which, we shiink from torturing pain. 
But there is no quality of moral goodness in 
shrinking from pain, none in merely being fright- 
ened by the contemplation of the severities of 
suffering which we ourselves may possibly have 
to endure in the world to come; nor can the 
dread of them have any morally salutary effect 
upon us and upon our conduct here in this life, 
except in so far as they serve to awaken and 
quicken our consciences to a sense of the guilt 
and ill desert of sin. 

Our Lord's object in making these disclosures 
doubtless was that they might have the effect of 
quickening and deepening in us the conviction 
that being wicked is in itself something far worse 
than being punished for our wickedness ; that the 
evil character and disposition which necessarily 
excludes the soul from union with its God is in 
itself more di^eadfal than any outward punishment 
we may imagine it to entail; so that in the end 
we mav become more desirous to o^ain deliverance 
from the power of sin in this life than from its 
punishment in the life beyond the grave. In 
such a disposition consists the essential and only 
true salvation of the soul. And such a disposition 
will make us resign ourselves submissively to 
whatever painful discipline Divine Wisdom and 
Love may subject us to in this world or in the 
world to come. 



THROUGH PAIN TO PENITENCE. 41 

1^. Through Pain to Penitence. 

I doubt not the beneficent purpose, however 
imperfectly I may understand the connection be- 
tween the means and the end. This I know, 
that God is not cruel. ^'He doth not willingly 
afflict or gi*ieve the children of men." His inflic- 
tions are the chastisements of fatherly love — as 
in this world, so doubtless in the seonian world 
to come. It pains him to give us pain, even as 
it pains the good earthly father to punish his son 
for his son's own good. He no more takes de- 
light in the pain he inflicts than the tender-heart- 
ed surgeon does when he cuts off his patient's limb 
to save his patient's life. Terribly have many, 
who have assumed to speak in God's name, mis- 
construed the purpose of the painful discipline 
ordained for sinful men in the world beyond the 
grave. 

13, The Worm and the Fire, 

The awful language in which our Lord (in 
Mark xi. 42-48) with six times reiterated warn- 
ing bids us beware of the folly of incurring aeonian 
suff*erings in the life to come by sinful gratifica- 
tions in this life, has been construed as declaring 
not only the endlessness of those sufferings (a point 
on which I have already said all that need be said), 
but that they are to be regarded as infiictions of 
Divine lorath^ and the ''worm that dieth not," 



42 ENDLESS FUTURE OF THE HUMAN RACE. 

and the " fire that is not quenched," as imaging 
the infliction. But our Lord's language does not 
necessarily contain any justification of the horrible 
notion. On the contrary, it suggests and sanctions 
the idea that these sufiferings are a needful puri- 
fying discipline inflicted by the hand of the all- 
merciful Father. Gehenna and its worm and 
fire — to which Christ makes allusion — were* a be- 
neficent agency, consuming what would otherwise 
have made the air of Jerusalem unfit for man to 
breathe. Certain it is that such was the effect of 
the wholesome worm and of the fire that was kept 
burning day and night in the valley of Hinnom. 

But what a picture of fiendish cruelties of tor- 
ture inflicted by the wratli of God the fancy of Pol- 
lok has drawn in his " Course of Time " ! The un- 
dying worm is a monster of the ^' serpent kind," 
with a thousand snaky heads and with as many 
tails tipped with stings, and its mouths have each 
a sting forked and long and venomous and sharp, 
and in its infinite writhings malignantly grasping 
human hearts quivering with torture, and making 
vain efforts to avoid the transpiercing stings. 

Equally horrible is the description of the lake 
of burning fire into which sinful souls are remorse- 
lessly plunged — miserable beings burning per- 
petually yet unconsumed, and forced to drink fre- 
quent cups of burning gall, and filling their fiery 
prison with bowlings of woe and blasphemous 
curses, to which the only response from above is 



THE WORM AND THE FIRE. 43 

the inexorable refrain, " Ye knew your duty and 
ye did it not." ^ 

What an inspiration that which could prompt 
such poetic (?) pictures of horror in honor of the 
God of wrath ! 

In such a God I never can believe. I believe 
in the God who is love, whose tender mercies are 
supreme over all his works. The '^ wrath of the 
Lamb " is a wrath of infinite Divine tenderness, 
purifying us " as by fire " — a fire of love consum- 
ing our sinfulness to save our souls. " This uni- 
verse," says a fervid writer, " is the theatre of 
boundless and endless ministries of mercy, work- 
ing through pain to blessed issues ; the love that 
won the scepter on Calvary will wield it as a 
power, waxing ever, waning never, through all 
the ages ; the Father will never cease from yearn- 
ing over the prodigals, and Christ will never cease 
from seeking the lost while one knee remains 
stubborn before the name of Jesus, and one heart 
unmastered by his love." In this conviction " we 
can face the vision of the terrible pain which sad- 
dens the outlooks of life as disclosed in the Divine 
Word." The burden, which would else be too 
crushing for us, is lifted in a measure from our 

* See, in the Appendix on " Orthodox Representations of 
Future Punishment," the passages from Pollok's " Course of 
Time," Book I., which I have referred to above. In that Appen- 
dix may be seen a catena of passages from prose writers not less 
abominable in expression. 



44 ENDLESS FUTURE OF THE HUMAN RACE. 

spirits, as we see around, above, beyond this dread 
experience the boundless and everlasting minis- 
tries of mercy drawing tbe sinner through the 
depths of anguish to the light, to the home, to the 
heart of God."^ 

j?^. Finale. 

I leave off by repeating what I said at the out- 
set of this letter. I humbly hope and trust that 
the endless existence of every human being will 
ultimately become one of endless goodness* and 
blessedness. I can set no limits to the resources 
of the wisdom and power which infinite love must 
needs move the all-merciful Father to employ for 
the highest good of all his spiritual creatures. 
And throughout the ages of the ♦lever-ending fu- 
ture he has time enough to make trial of the in- 
exhaustible riches of his grace. Must not evil in 
the end go down vanquished and destroyed by the 
all-conc[uering power of Divine love? In this 
hope I subscribe myself your ever-faithful friend, 

C. S. Henry. 

* Baldwin Brown's " Doctrine of Annihilation in tlie Light 
of the Gospel of Love," p. 118. 



APPEKDIOES. 



APPENDIX I. 

Modern Orthodox Bejyi'esentations of Future 
Punishment, 

It is not wortli while, for my purpose, to go 
into a particular recital of the opinions that pre- 
vailed in the early Church on the endless duration 
of future punishment. For five centuries it was 
regarded as an open question on which different 
opinions were held by Fathers of eminence and 
authority. 

My particular purpose in this Appendix is to 
give some specimens of the views which have 
prevailed since the Reformation. -For, strange as 
it may seem to many persons, the modern Protes- 
tant representations of hell and its torments have 
been more awful and revolting than those of the 
mediaeval age. Hundreds of citations might be 
given in proof of it. I shall only cull out from 
the great mass such as I find in the books I haj)- 
pen to have in hand. 

To begin with Calvin : " No description," 

says he, " can equal the severity of the Divine 

vengeance on the reprobate. . . . Harassed and 
3 



48 APPENDIX I. 

agitated with a dreadful tempest, they shall feel 
themselves torn asunder by an angry God, and 
transfixed and penetrated by mortal stings, ter- 
rified by the thunderbolts of God, and broken by 
the weight of- his hand : so that to sink into any 
gulfs and abysses would be more tolerable than to 
stand for a moment in these terrors. How great 
and severe, then, is the punishment to endure the 
never-ceasing effects of his wrath ! " ^ 

Take next some passages from Bishop Jeremy 
Taylor's discourse on " The Pains of Hell." '' We 
are amazed," he says, " at the inhumanity of Pha- 
laris, who roasted men in his brazen bull ; this 
was joy in respect of that fire of hell which pene- 
trates the very entrails without consuming them. 
. . . Husbands shall see their wives, parents their 
children, tormented before their eyes. . . . The 
bodies of the damned shall be crowded together 
in hell like grapes in a wine-press which press 
one another tili they burst. . . . Every distinct 
sense and organ shall be assailed with its own 
appropriate and most exquisite sufferings. Tem- 
poral fire is but a painted fire in respect of the 
penetrating and real fire in hell." f 

Contemporary with Bishop Taylor, and not 
less famous, was Dr. Isaac Barrow, who describes 

* Calvin's " Institutes," Book III., chapter xxv., § 12. See 
also Allen's translation, put out by the Presbyterian Board of 
Publication, vol. ii., p. 218. 

f " Contemplation on the State of Man," chapters vi.-viii. 



MODERN ORTHODOX REPRESENTATIONS. 49 

the future state of the wicked as that of being 
" detruded into utmost wretchedness ; into a con- 
dition far more dark and dismal, more forlorn and 
disconsolate, than we can imagine ; which not the 
sharpest pain of body, nor the bitterest anxiety 
of mind which any of us hath ever felt, can in 
any measure represent ; wherein our bodies shall 
be afflicted continually by a sulphurous flame, not 
only scorching the skin, but piercing the inmost 
sinews." ^ 

But nothing can surpass the frightful energy 
with which the celebrated Jonathan Edw^ards por- 
trays the torments of the damned : " God holds 
sinners in his hands over the mouth of hell as so 
many spiders ; and he is dreadfully provoked, and 
he not only hates them, but holds them in utmost 
contempt, and he will trample them under his 
feet with inexpressible fierceness ; he will crush 
their blood out, and will make it fly so that he 
will sprinkle his garments and stain all his rai- 
ment." t In another place he says : " The world 
w^ll probably be converted into a great lake or 
liquid globe of fire — a vast ocean of fire, in which 
the wicked shall be overwhelmed, which will al- 
ways be in tempest, in which they shall be tossed 
to and fro, having no rest day or night — vast 
waves or billows of fire continually rolling over 
their heads, of which they shall forever be full of 

* Barrow's "Works," vol. v., p. 213. 
f Edwards's " Works," vol. vii., p. 499. 



50 APPEXDIX I. 

a quick sense within and without ; their heads, 
their eyes, their tongues, their hands, their feet, 
their loins, and their vitals shall forever be full' 
of a glowing, melting fire, fierce enough to melt 
the very rocks and elements ; and also they shall 
eternally be full of the most quick and lively 
sense to feel the torments ; not for one minute, 
nor for one day, nor for one age, nor for two ages, 
nor for a hundred ages, nor for ten thousands of 
millions of ages one after another, but forever and 
ever, without any end at all, and never, never be 
delivered." ^ 

What wonder is it that such terrific utterances 
had the effect they are said to have had upon those 
who heard them — ^believing, as they did, the truth 
of every word they heard ? " Whole congrega- 
tions," as Edwards's biographers relate, "shud- 
dered and simultaneously rose to their feet, smit- 
ing their breasts, weeping and groaning." f And 
what wonder is it that theologians and preachers 
who could paint a God so fiendish as to take de-' 
light in the torments of the wicked in hell, should 
represent the blessed dwellers in heaven as finding 
an equally fiendish delight in the horrible spec- 
tacle ? This shocking notion was first put out — 
so far as I know — in the thirteenth century, by 
St. Thomas Aquinas, who said, " In order that 
the saints may enjoy their beatitude more richly, 

* Edwards's " Works," vol. viii., p. 166. 

f Alger's "Doctrine of a Future Life," p. 517. 



MODERN ORTHODOX REPRESENTATIONS. 51 

a perfect sight of the punishment of the damned 
is granted to them." The Pm-itans of a later 
period seemed to revel in the idea that " the joys 
of the blessed were to be deepened and sharpened 
by constant contrast with the sufferings of the 
damned." Jonathan Edwards thus expresses the 
same thought : " The sight of hell torments will 
exalt the happiness of the saints forever. It will 
not only make them more sensible of the great- 
ness and freeness of the grace of God in their 
own happiness, but it will really make their hap- 
piness the greater, as it will make them more sen- 
sible of their own happiness ; it will give them a 
more lively relish for it ; it will make them prize 
it more. A sense of the opposite misery in any 
case greatly increases the relish of any joy or 
pleasure." "^ 

But the celebrated New England divine. Dr. 
Samuel Hopkins, contemporary with Edwards and 
his biographer, has given perhaps the most in- 
tense expression to the frightful idea. Of the 
wicked he says : " The smoke of their torment 
shall ascend up in the sight of the blessed forever 
and ever, and serve as a most clear glass always 
before their eyes to give them a bright and most 
affecting view. This display of the Divine char- 
acter will be most entertaining [ ! ] to all who love 
God, and wdll give them the highest and most in- 
effable pleasure. Should the fire of this eternal 

* Edwards's " Works," vol. iii., p. 276. 



52 APPEXDIX I. 

pnnislimeiit cease, it would in a great measure 
obscure the light of heaven, and put an end to 
a great part of the happiness and glory of the 
blessed." "^ 

Coming^ now into our own century, let us see 
what of like sort we find. The eminent Ameri- 
can divine and preacher. Dr. Gardiner Spring, 
not long since gone from the earth, said : " The 
souls of all who have died in their sins are in hell, 
and there their bodies will be after the resurrec- 
tion. . . . "When the omnipotent and angry God, 
who has access to all the avenues of distress in 
the corporeal frame, and all the inlets to agony in 
the intellectual constitution, undertakes to punish, 
he will convince the universe that he does not 
gird himself for the work of retribution in vain. 
. . . It will be a glorious deed when he who 
hung on Calvary shall cast those who have trod- 
den his blood under their feet into the furnace of 
fire where there shall be weeping and wailing 
and gnashing of teeth." f 

The celebrated John Henry Newman, in his 
sermon on the " Neglect of Divine Calls and 
Warnings," says of one of the damned: "His 
soul is in hell, O ye children of men ! While 
thus ye speak, his soul is in the beginning of those 
torments in which his body will soon have part, 

* Park's '' Memoir of Hopkins," pp. 201, 202. Hopkins died 
in 1802, at the age of eighty-two. 

t " The Glory of Christ," vol. ii., p. 258. 



MODERN ORTHODOX REPRESENTATIONS. 53 

and whicli will never die." '^ And Mr. Spurgeon, 
another famous living writer and preacher, in his 
graphic and fearful sermon on " The Resurrection 
of the Dead/' says : " When thou diest thy soul 
will be tormented alone ; that will be a hell for 
it : but at the day of judgment thy body will 
join thy soul, and then thou wilt have twin hells, 
thy soul sweating drops of blood and thy body 
suffused with agony. In fire, exactly like that 
which we have on earth, thy body w^ill lie, asbes- 
tus-like, forever unconsumed, all thy veins roads 
for the feet of Pain to travel on, every nerve a 
string on which the devil shall forever play his 
diabolical tune of ' Hell's Unutterable Lament.' " f 
The woes of hell had in the mediaeval age 
their poet in Dante. In the present age they 
have found one in Robert Pollok. As poets I 
do not compare them, for who would think of 
naming them together ? But the pictures in the 
" Inferno " are less coarsely and revoltingly hor- 
rible than in Pollok's " Course of Time." Take 
his portrait of the " worm that never dies " : 

"... But how sLall I describe 
Wliat naught resembles else my eye hath seen ? 
Of worm or serpent kind it something looked, 
But monstrous, with a thousand snaky heads, 
Eyed each with double orbs of glaring wrath ; 
And with as many tails, that twisted out 

* Vide Alger, *' Doctrine of a Future Life," p. 520. 
t Ibid., p. 518. 



51 APPENDIX I. 

In horrid revolution, tipped with stings ; 
And all its mouths, that wide and darkly gaped. 
And breathed most poisonous breath, had each a sting 
Forked, and long, and venomous, and sharp ; 
And in its writhings infinite it grasped 
Malignantly what seemed a heart swoUen, black, 
And quivering with torture most intense ; 
And still the heart, with anguish throbbing high, 
Made effort to escape, but could not ; for 
Howe'er it turned, and oft it vainly turned. 
These complicated foldings held it fast. 
And still the monstrous beast with sting of bead 
Or tail transpierced it bleeding evermore. 
What this could image much I searched to know, 
And while I stood and gazed and wondered long, 
. A voice from whence I know not, for no one 
I saw, distinctly whispered in my ear 
These words — ' This is the worm that never dies! ' " 

To the foregoing citations I will only further 
add something respecting the fate of infants and 
of the heathen. 

Calvin assumes the truth of the doctrine of in- 
fant damnation in that celebrated, often-quoted 
passage in his '' Institutes," where he says, " That 
the fall of Adam should involve so many nations 
with their infant children in eternal death .... 
is, I confess, an awful decree," "^ which yet he jus- 
tifies as the result of that Divine predestination 
" whereby God has determined in himself what 
he would have to become of every individual of 

* " Institutes," Book III., chapter xxiv., § 12. — Allen's trans- 
lation, vol. ii., p. 170. 



MODERN ORTHODOX REPRESENTATIONS. 55 

mankind. For they are not all created with a 
similar destiny ; but eternal life is foreordained 
for some, and eternal damnation for others " ; and 
that " to those whom he devotes to condemnation 
the gate of life is closed by a just and irreprehen- 
sible but incomprehensible judgment." ^ 

The Lutheran doctrine, as expressed in the 
" Augsburg Confession," teaches that, " after the 
fall of Adam, all men who are naturally born are 
born in sin ; that is, born with evil desires, etc. ; 
and this disease or original vitiosity is truly sin, 
damnable and entailing the wrath of God and 
eternal death on all who are not regenerated by 
baptism by the Holy Spirit." f Mosheim, the 
eminent Lutheran divine of the last century, says : 
" This depravity of our nature, although it is in- 
voluntary in us and derived from our first parents, 
is nevertheless imputed to us as sin in the chan- 
cery of heaven. Wherefore^ if no other sin were 
added^ we shouldhe exj)osed to Divine punishment^ 
on account of this depravity itself T % 

In somewhat softened phrase, evangelical Lu- 
therans of a later day say : " Even the souls of 
those who on account of their innate depravity die 
in their infancy, although they are themselves in- 
nocent, still participate in some degree in the pun- 
ishment inflicted on Adam, inasmuch as they are 

* Allen's translation, vol. ii., pp. 145, 149. 

f " Sylloge Confessionum," Oxon., 1827, p. 166. 

\ Mosheim, "Elements of Dogmatic Theology," vol. i., p. 540. 



56 APPENDIX I. 

justly regarded to be iin worthy to be fellow mem- 
bers of the society of angels and the just made 
perfect in the kingdom of heaven, and partakers 
of the blessedness which they enjoy." ^ 

As to the fate of the heathen, take the decla- 
rations of the American Board of Commissioners 
for Foreign Missions — as I find them in " Alger^s 
" Doctrine of a Future Life." I am not able to lay 
my hand on the official documents, but there is 
no reason whatever to suppose the quotations have 
not been correctly made. 

'' To send the gospel to the heathen," say these 
commissioners, "is a work of great exigency. 
Within the last thirty years a whole generation of 
five hundred millions have gone down to eternal 
death." Again, the same Board say in their tract 
entitled "The Grand Motive to Missionary Ef- 
fort " : " The heathen are involved in the ruins of 
the apostasy, and are expressly doomed to perdi- 
tion. Six hundred millions of deathless souls on 
the brink of hell ! What a spectacle ! " An Amer- 
ican missionary to China said, in a public address 
after his return : " Fifty thousand a day go down 
to the fire that is not quenched. Six hundred 
millions more are going the same road. Should 
you not think at least once a day of the fifty thou- 
sand who that day sink to the doom of the lost ? " f 

* Storr and Flatt, " Biblical Theology," Schmucker's edition, 
Andover, 1826, vol. ii., p. 69. 

f Alger, *' Doctrine of a Future Life," p. 544. 



MODERN ORTHODOX REPRESENTATIONS. 57 

What a frightful contemplation is offered to our 
minds if it be true (as is here alleged) that igno- 
rance of Christ and consequent want of an explicit 
faith in him entail the endless perdition of the 
soul ! In the upshot it comes to this : that not 
only fifty thousand go daily down to an endless 
hell, but the great bulk of mankind for the four 
thousand years before Christ came and for the two 
thousand years since he came have gone there. 
As I roughly compute it, a hundred and fifty thou- 
sand millions of human beings have come into 
existence here on the earth and passed away by 
death ; and of these the vast majority are now in 
hell, and doomed to abide there forever, for not 
believing in a Saviour they never heard of! I 
thank God neither our mother Church of England 
nor her American daughter requires me to hold or 
to preach any such doctrine, although I have heard 
it preached by ministers of both. 

The sketch I have given of the '' Orthodox " 
notions on future punishment from the commence- 
ment of the Reformation to the present time 
will, I think, justify the statement that the mod- 
ern Protestant doctrine is far more hideous and 
revolting than anything taught in Christendom 
during the ancient or the mediaeval period. 



APPENDIX IT. 

Mediceval Ojpinion.^ 

Throughout the middle ages the world after 
death continued to reveal more fully its awful 
secrets. Hell, purgatory, and heaven, became 
more distinct — ^if it may be so said, more visible. 
Their site, their topography, their torments, their 
trials, their enjoyments, became more conceivable, 
almost more palpable to sense ; till Dante summed 
up the whole of this traditional lore, or at least, 
with a poet's intuitive sagacity, seized on all which 
was most imposing, eilective, real, and condensed 
it in his three coordinate poems. That hell had 
a local existence, that immaterial spirits suffered 
bodily and material torments, none, or scarcely 
one hardy speculative mind, presumed to doubt. 
Hell admitted, according to legend, more than 
one visitant from this upper world who returned 
to relate his fearful journey to wondering man : 
St. Fiercy, St. Yettin, a layman Bernilo. But all 
these early descents interest us only as they may 
be supposed or appear to have been faint types of 

* Extract from Milman's " Latin Christianity^' pp. 221-22T. 



MEDIJEYAL OPINION. 59 

the great Italian poet. Dante is tlie one author- 
ized topographer of the mediaeval hell. His origi- 
nality is no more called in question by these mere 
signs and manifestations of the popular belief than 
by the existence and reality of those objects or 
scenes in external nature which he describes with 
such unrivaled truth. In Dante meet imrecon- 
ciled (who thought or cared for their reconcilia- 
tion ?) those strange contradictions — immaterial 
souls subject to material torments ; spirits which 
had put off the mortal body cognizable by the cor- 
poreal sense. The mediseval hell had gathered 
from all ages, all lands, all races, its imagery, its 
denizens, its site, its access, its commingling hor- 
rors : from the old Jewish traditions, perhaps from 
regions beyond the sphere of the Old Testament ; 
from the pagan poets with their black rivers, their 
Cerberus, their boatman, his crazy vessel ; perhaps 
from Teutonic Hela through some of the earlier 
visions. Then came the great poet, and reduced 
all this wild chaos to a kind of order, molded it 
up with the cosmical notions of the times, and 
made it, as it were, one with the prevalent mun- 
dane system. Above all, he brought it to the very 
borders of our world ; he made the life beyond 
the grave one with our present life ; he mingled 
in close and intimate relation the present and the 
future. Hell, purgatory, heaven, were but an im- 
mediate expansion and extension of the present 
world. And this is among the wonderful causes 



60 APPENDIX 11. 

of Dante's power, the realizing the unreal by the 
admixture of the real — even as in his imagery the 
actual, homely, every-day language or similitude 
mingles with and heightens the fantastic, the 
vague, the transmundane. What effect had hell 
produced, if peopled by ancient, almost imme- 
morial objects of human detestation, Ximrod or 
Iscariot, or Julian or Mohammed ? It was when 
popes all but living, kings but now on their thrones, 
Guelphs who had hardly ceased to walk the streets 
of Florence, Ghibellines almost yet in exile, re- 
vealed their awful doom — this it was which, as it 
expressed the passions and the fears of mankind 
of an instant, immediate, actual, bodily, compre- 
hensive place of torment : so wherever it was read, 
it deepened that notion and made it more distinct 
and natm^al. This was the hell conterminous to 
the earth, but separate, as it were, by a gulf passed 
by almost instantaneous transition, of which the 
priesthood held the keys. These keys the auda- 
cious poet had wrenched from their hands, and 
dared to turn on many of themselves, speaking 
even against popes the sentence of condemnation. 
Of that which hell, purgatory, heaven, were in the 
popular opinion during the middle ages, Dante 
was but the full, deep, concentrated expression ; 
what he embodied in verse all men believed, 
feared, hoped. 

Purgatory had now its intermediate place be- 
tween heaven and hell as unquestioned, as undis- 



MEBIMYAL OPINION. 61 

turbed by doubt; its existence was as much an 
article of uncontested popular belief as heaven or 
hell. It were as unjust and nnphilosophical to 
attribute all the legendary lore which realized pur- 
gatory to the sordid invention of the churchman 
or the monk, as it w^ould be nnhistorical to deny 
the use which was made of this superstition to ex- 
tract tribute from the fears or the fondness of 
mankind. But the abuse grew^ out of the belief; 
the belief was not slowly, subtly instilled into the 
mind for the sake of the abuse. Purgatory, pos- 
sible w^ith St. Augustine, probable with Gregory 
the Great, grew up, I am persuaded (its growth is 
singularly indistinct and untraceable), out of the 
mercy and modesty of the priesthood. To the 
eternity of hell torments there is and ever must 
be — notwithstanding the peremptory decrees of 
dogmatic theology and the reverential dread in so 
many religious minds of tampering wdth what 
seems the language of the New Testament — a tacit 
repugnance. But when the doom of every man 
rested on the lips of the priest, on his absolution 
or refusal of absolution, that priest might well 
tremblewith some natural awe — awe not confessed 
to himself — at dismissing the soul to an irrevo- 
cable, "unrepealable, michangeable destiny. He 
would not be averse to pronounce a more miti- 
gated, a revisable sentence. The keys of heaven 
and of hell were a fearful trust, a terrible respon- 
sibility ; the key of purgatory might be used with 



62 APPENDIX II. 

far less presumption, with less trembling confi- 
dence. Then came naturally, as might seem, the 
strengthening and exaltation of the efficacy of 
prayer, of the efficacy of the sacrifice of the altar, 
and the efficacy of the intercession of the saints : 
anxl these all within the province, within the power 
of the sacerdotal order. Their authority, their 
influence, their intervention, closed not with the 
grave. The departed soul was still to a certain 
degree dependent upon the priest. They had yet 
a mission, it might be of mercy ; they had still 
some power of saving the soul after it had depart- 
ed from the body. Their faithful love, their inex- 
haustible interest, might yet rescue the sinner ; for 
he had not reached those gates over which alone 
was written, " There is no hope " — the gates of 
hell. That which was a mercy, a consolation, be- 
came a trade, an inexhaustible source of wealth. 
Praying souls out of purgatory, by masses said on 
their behalf, became an ordinary office, an office 
which deserved, which could demand, which did 
demand, the most prodigal remuneration. It was 
later that the indulgence, originally the remission 
of so much penance, of so many days, weeks, 
months, years ; or of that which was the commu- 
tation for penance, so much almsgiving or mu- 
nificence to churches or to churchmen, in sound at 
least extended (and mankind, the high and low 
vulgar of mankind, are governed by sound). its 
significance; it was literally understood, as the 



MEDIEVAL OPINION. 63 

remission of so many years, sometimes centuries, 
of purgatory. 

If there were living men to whom it had been 
vouchsafed to visit and return and reveal the se- 
crets of remote and terrible hell, there were those 
too who were admitted in vision or in actual life 
to more accessible purgatory, and brought back 
intelligence of its real local existence, and of the 
state of souls within its penitential circles. There 
is a legend of St. Paul himself; of the French 
monk St. Farcy ; of Drithelm, related by Bede ; 
of the Emperor Charles the Fat, by William of 
Malmesbury. Matthew Paris relates two or three 
journeys of the monk of Evesham, of Thurkill, 
an Essex peasant, very wild and fantastic. The 
purgatory of St. Patrick, the purgatory of Owen 
Miles, the vision of Alberic of Monte Casino, were 
among the most popular and wide-spread legends 
of the ages preceding Dante ; and as in hell, so 
in purgatory, Dante sums up in his noble verses 
the whole theory, the whole popular belief, as to 
this intermediate sphere. 



APPENDIX III. 

Recent Roman Catholio Rej^resentations. 

Oxenham's " Catholic Eschatology, an Essay 
on the Doctrine of Future Eetribntion" (London, 
1876), is devoted to a vindication of the dogma of 
the endless punishment of the lost. I give here 
some extracts from it : 

" . . . . The causes which have mainly con- 
tributed to foster, even in religious and reveren- 
tial minds, a repugnance to the dogma of eternal 
punishment, I believe may, broadly speaking, be 
reduced to two. 

" In the first place, all sorts of popular opin- 
ions or fancies — pure idola fori^ as they may 
be termed, and which' at best are but accidental 
accessories of the doctrine — have got mixed up 
with it in men's minds till they have almost lost 
sight of its essential meaning. Such are various 
notions about the place and the exact nature of 
future punishment, of physical torture, material 
fire, and the like, which may or may not be true, 



RECENT ROMAN REPRESENTATIONS. 65 

but are matters of speculation only, on which in 
all ages different opinions have been maintained 
by theologians of unimpeached orthodoxy. . . . 
One point it may be well to notice at once, be- 
cause to many minds it has seemed to invest the 
whole doctrine with peculiar horror. There is 
something shocking to our natural instincts in the 
damnation of unbaptized infants, understood in a 
coarse and popular sense. . . . But no such mon- 
strosity is involved in the Catholic doctrine. . . . 
But the most conspicuous example of this care- 
less or insidious confusion between the essence of 
the dogma and its purely separable accidents, and 
which has probably done more than all other mis- 
conceptions put together to prejudice men's minds 
against it, remains to be noticed. ... I am not 
acquainted with a single Universalist writer who 
does not argue as though the doctrine he is assail- 
ing" (the doctrine of eternal punishment) "in- 
volved the damnation of the great majority of 
mankind .... the damnation not only of un- 
baptized infants, . . . but of the entire heathen 
world. . . . The damnation of the entire hea- 
then world, both before and. since incarnation, be- 
came a necessary corollary of the fundamental 
tenets of the Reformers, and was openly pro- 
claimed as such. And the recoil from a con- 
clusion shocking to the mind, and drawn from 
premises alike unphilosophical and heterodox, 
contributed not a little to the attack on a dog- 



66 APPENDIX III. 

ma " (eternal punishment) ^' which is in no wise 
responsible for that conclusion. 

" .... I am brought to the second and most 
far-reaching and effective of the two causes just 
now referred to as having mainly influenced re- 
ligious minds in their revolt against the revealed 
doctrine of eternal punishment. That cause lies 
in the neglect or denial among Protestants of 
another great Christian truth, attested by heathen 
philosophy and tradition, no less than by the 
teaching of the Church, and of which it may be 
said with terrible emphasis neglectum sui ulcisi- 
tur. I mean the doctrine of purgatory and prayer 
for the departed. It is certainly a strange Neme- 
sis on those w^ho for upward of three centuries 
have been inveighing against this doctrine as a 
pagan superstition, to find themselves constrained 
suddenly to turn round upon us with the charge 
that we are teaching ^horrible' and 'infamous' 
doctrines, and are no better than ' priests of Mo- 
loch' if we decline to accept at their bidding a 
universal purgatory for everybody. ... In spite, 
however, of this overwhelming weight of external 
authority and of the elementary instincts of natu- 
ral religion, the Reformers .... made short work 
of purgatory and prayer for the dead. And if the 
Church of England is not committed to any ex- 
press denial of the doctrine, every trace of it was 
studiously expunged from the revised Prayer-Book 



RECENT ROMAN REPRESENTATIONS. 67 

of 1552, and under this authorized desuetude it 
dropped — ^gradually, perhaps, but inevitably — out 
of the religious faith and practice of the multitude. 
There must always have been many who, like Dr. 
Johnson, interceded privately for their lost ones, 
while many more who dared not rebel against the 
tyranny of a false tradition groaned in secret un- 
der the perverse refinement of superstitious cru- 
elty which, in the hour of darkness and desola- 
tion, when all earthly lights are darkened and the 
stricken heart instinctively turns to God, sternlj^ 
forbade them to name before him mother, or wife, 
or child, or beloved friend, whose name till then 
had never been absent from their daily prayers. 
It is customary with Anglicans to talk of ' our 
beautiful burial service,' and beautiful no doubt 
it is, so far as language goes ; naturally enough, for 
nearly every word of it, not contained in the text 
of Scripture, is taken from Catholic sources. Its 
fault is not of commission but of omission, but it 
is a radical one. It has often been my lot to hear 
that service read over the graves of those very dear 
to me, and at such times I have never been able 
to escape a bitter sense of the unreality of a ritual, 
however musical in expression, which consigns 
their bodies to the earth without one syllable of 
intercession for their parted souls."^ A service 

* With such pedantic and rigid minuteness is this prineiple 
carried out, that while solemn commendation of the body to the 
earth is still retained, the accompanying commendation of the 



68 APPENDIX III. 

for the dead wliieh omits to pray for them is in- 
deed, to use the hackneyed simile, like ' Hamlet ' 
with the Prince of Denmark left ont ! And this 
cold neglect of intercession for the departed has 
induced a thoroughly false habit of mind regard- 
ing their present condition and our relation to 
them. . . . 

" It is in no spirit of captiousness or theological 
partisanship that I refer to the matter here, nor is 
it even chiefly in order to emphasize the grave 
neo-lect of one of the most obvious and uro-ent 
obligations of Christian charity, which has thus 
been introduced and perpetuated for centuries. 
But I wished to call attention to the indirect re- 
sults of this denial of purgatory and consequent 
disuse of prayer for the departed. ... Let it be 
granted — as is implied in the Tridentine decree 
on the subject — that errors or abuses had crept 
into the current teaching about purgatory, as there 
were also erroneous opinions afloat about the effi- 
cacy of good works. That was a good reason 
for explaining, not for rejecting, the doctrines 
which had been misunderstood. Anglicans at 
least might be expected to remember the principle 
which Hooker uses with so much effect against 
his Puritan assailants, that ' the abuse of a thing 
taketh not away the lawful use thereof.' But just 
as Luther in his misguided zeal for the interests 

soul to *' God the Father Almighty," found in Edward VI.'s First 
Book, was struck out by the Puritan revisers of 1552. 



RECENT ROMAN REPRESENTATIONS. 69 

of morality invented a new theory of justification, 
which is proved by reason and experience to be 
profoundly immoral, so did the rejection of pur- 
gatory on the part of the Reformers determine, 
by an inevitable recoil, the revolt of their children 
against that dogma of eternal punishment to which 
thej hoped thereby to give additional prominence. 

" We can not wonder that it should be so. If 
the disembodied spirit passes straight from the 
death-bed to its eternal home, the diflSculties of 
the received belief become wellnigh insuperable. 
How few comparatively are there who, even to 
our clouded and partial apprehension, appear fit 
at the moment of departure for the presence into 
which nothing that is defiled can enter ! And to 
imagine, as Mohler expresses it, some mechanical 
efiect in the mere ^act of deliverance from the 
body,' or ' magical change ' immediately following 
it, is an hypothesis as arbitrary and unphilosoph- 
ical as it is wholly destitute of Scriptural sup- 
port. . . . 

" . . . . The difificulty is met by the Catholic 
doctrine of purgatory. For the sufierings of that 
intermediate state, as Mohler is careful to insist, 
are no mere mechanical infliction, nor can the 
sufferer be regarded as other than a voluntary 
agent in the working out of his own final purifi- 
cation. . . . The will cooperates actively in the 
divine process whereby the remains of evil habits 
and inclinations are gradually purged away, till 



70 APPENDIX III. 

the perfect image of Christ is reproduced in the 
soul, and it is made fit for the beatific vision and 
the inheritance of the saints in light. . . . Some- 
times the work is complete in this life, but oftener 
it is not. Years or centuries of corrective disci- 
pline may be required for some. . . . 

" But since Christ was crucified no soul of 
man, not dying in infancy, was ever sanctified 
without suffering, whether its fire-baptism be en- 
dured in this life or in the world beyond the grave. 

" . . . . Purgatory serves to illustrate the awful 
purity and tender compassion of our God. It wit- 
nesses to that perfect holiness without which none 
may see his face, and to the long-suffering charity 
which would still at the eleventh hour ' devise a 
way to bring his banished home.' We may not 
dare to penetrate the secrets of his providence, 
but we may thankfully gaze with hope as well as 
awe on what Faber has somewhere beautifully 
called that 'eighth great sacrament of fire,' and 
trust it will avail for the final purification of count- 
less millions who have partially misused or neg- 
lected or been inculpably deprived of the seven 
sacraments of earth. When we contemplate, for 
instance, the multitudes of this huge metropolis, 
and consider how large is the proportion of them 
who .... are born into an atmosphere charged 
with impurity and blasphemy, and often, after a 
few short years of coarse and godless frivolity or 
unsolaced suffering, sink into an early and what 



RECENT ROMAN REPRESENTATIONS. 71 

looks like a hopeless grave, the spectacle would 
indeed be a heart-rending one if we had not rea- 
son to believe that for many of these also, who in 
the unerring judgment of the great Discerner of 
hearts have not sinned fatally against the light, 
there may remain that second baptism of fire to 
anneal them for the presence they had never been 
taught to recognize on earth. In vast numbers of 
those neglected children, the street Arabs of our 
overgrown cities, are latent, we can not doubt, the 
same admirable moral capabilities which were so 
nobly exemplified the other day by the boys on 
the Goliath, and those who know most of them 
assure us that it is so ; but too often, from adverse 
circumstances and lack of opportunity, their better 
qualities remain undeveloped to the last in this 
world. And thus what, as regards ourselves, is a 
prospect full of the deepest awe, and a keen in- 
centive to work out oar salvation while it is yet 
day, enables us to judge hopefully of the future 
possibilities of others whose temptations may be 
stronger and their opportunities far less than ours, 
but of whom it were no true charity to doubt that 
they are not at present such as God would have 
them. 

" Take again the case of what are called death- 
bed conversions. I am far from denying that such 
things are possible, and may not be uncommon, 
though there is not perhaps much evidence to 
show it. The oj)erations of grace can not be lim- 



Y2 APPENDIX in. 

ited by measurements of earthly time, and in that 
last horn' of his extremest need the prodigal may 
heed the call so long neglected, return to his 
Father's arms, and die forgiven. But the habits 
and associations of a lifetime are not so easily un- 
learned, and the work of sanctification has still 
to be accomplished. The soul has all the scars of 
its old sins and corrupt tastes and dispositions still 
upon it ; it is ' not pure nor strong enough for 
bliss,' and must be cleansed and braced and per- 
fected in the fires of God's righteous correction be- 
fore it can bear the unclouded sunshine of his love. 

" On whichever side it is looked at, the doc- 
trine of purgatory is a most helpful, most consol- 
ing, most practical, most fruitful, most suggestive, 
most indispensable truth. We can hardly make 
too much of it so long as we do not confound the 
salutary discipline of that intermediate trial-place 
with the worm that dieth not and the fire that is 
not quenched. So directly did the Keformers con- 
tradict the instincts of natural religion as well as 
the testimony of revelation in their denial of this 
truth, that many who had been brought up in their 
tenets rebelled against it. . . . 

" . . . . But without the recognized and regu- 
lar practice of prayer for the departed, which is 
its correlative, it can not be expected to take root 
in the popular belief. Its standing witness is 
found in the sacrifice of the mass." — ("Catho- 
lic Eschatology," etc., pp. 14-40.) 



APPENDIX IV. 

Alexander Ewing^ Bishop of Argyll and the 

Isles. 

Mr. Koss lias given us a memoir of that most 
loving and lovable man, from which I extract a 
few sentences : 

"It is good, sm^ely," says Mr. Eoss, "to re- 
produce so far as may be the history of a radiant, 
sympathizing human sonl who, much loved and 
greatly honored, knew how to infuse a fresh charm 
into the life not only of his fireside circle, but into 
that of the casual acquaintance on board a steamer, 
and who, endowed with a truly Highland chivalry, 
stood ever ready to come to the front in the bat- 
tle-field of human progress. But over and above 
these considerations Dr. Ewing had a special mes- 
sage to deliver to his fellow men on the most 
important of all subjects — on the character of 
God, the mission of Christ, the discipline of life, 
and life's ultimate issues. A theologian, indeed, 
was Alexander Ewing — a theologian who had 
become a little child, and listened reverently and 
humbly at the feet of Christ as he spoke to his 
heart, to all that was best in him of a Father in 



Y4 APPENDIX IV. 

heaven who is ' perfect ' — that was the word which 
made all things new for him. He had read, no 
doubt, of the measureless significance of this at- 
tribute in the writings of Thomas Erskine, but it 
was the great assertion of the redemption of man- 
kind contained in the English Prayer-Book which 
first broke up within him, beneath the crust of 
traditional dogma, the fountain of theological spec- 
ulation. . . . 

"....' The God of the New Testament,' says 
Niebuhr, in words which JSTeander has made known 
to all men, ' is " heart to heart." ' That truth is 
the key-note of all Bishop E wing's teaching. He 
has no. poor apologies to offer for his creed. He 
has no dismal compromises to effect between at- 
tributes, so called, of the divine nature. To him 
God is light — all light; his justice is light, his 
mercy is light .... its light is its own evidence, 
streaming into the heart and conscience that are 
kindred with it, and rejoice in it when once be- 
held, as the natural eye rejoiceth in the light of 
the sun. Incipient loyalty to Christ forbade him 
to doubt the truth of the words, ' He that f ollow- 
eth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall see 
the light of life.' He proved the words. He gave 
himself to Christ as the Lord of meekness, of sin- 
gleness of vision, of childlike, all-trustful, all-sub- 
missive uplooking. He was alone with the Alone, 
but with Christ as his guide ; and the Father who 
seeth in secret was 'himself his reward. He 



ALEXANDER EWING. 75 

found the secret of his creation — his own and that 
of all men. He learned to say ' Our Father/ and 
the inference which Christ teaches us to draw 
came upon his surprised and at first all but incred- 
ulous spirit with life-long power: ^ If ye, then, 
being evil, know how to give good gifts to your chil- 
dren, how much more shall your heavenly Father 
give all good things to them that ask him?' — 
how much moref Bishop Ewing felt himself 
borne up by these words into a regenerating new- 
ness of hope which no words could ever do more 
than faintly shadow. To the question, ^How 
much more?' his one response was, ^Infinitely 
more,' and hence he writes : ' God, seen as our 
Father, makes all things sweet, all paths straight, 
reconciles all things. This Fatherhood, once truly 
accepted, solves all perplexities, and makes the 
difficalties of life clear and plain. He is our 
Father, and, whatever is meant by that name, that 
is he and always so. Life, death, make no altera- 
tion in this relationship. In life, after death, he is 
equally the same, and Father. Beyond the shores 
of death we do not go into a strange country ; it 
is still our Father's house, where the Father is 
dealing with his children as they require. No 
time, no space, can destroy his eternal, uniform, 
and paternal relation." 

THE END. 



THE BOOK OF JOB: 

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